


To Ebb and Flow

by filia_noctis



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Colonialism, Folklore, Gen, Horror, India, Indian Character, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 15:42:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16936026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis
Summary: Safety may not be a habit.





	To Ebb and Flow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UrbanAmazon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/gifts).



> Dear Reader,  
> Thank you so much for your lovely prompt! I really enjoyed writing it.  
> I also let it run away with me a little. *coughs*  
> What we have here is Edith and Alan travelling (to and then) in India—India during the British Raj—and trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. In the process, I ended up using a lot of period and location appropriate references. I have tried providing as exhaustive a glossary, in order, as possible.  
> I sincerely hope you enjoy it.
> 
>  
> 
> 1\. The “foul cinchona tonic” is the beginning of quinine used in colonial India to treat malaria, a mosquito-borne disease.  
> 2\. “Jod-purr-ees” or Jodhpuris are breeches, tight, body hugging leg wear worn for horse riding and hunting by the affluent and the white, but also in general as a part of men’s formal wear.  
> 3\. “Sah-rees” or sarees are, well, Indian popular clothing for women across ethnicities. It is a long 8-10 yard long cloth wrapped around the body a particular way (numerous ways, to be honest). Blouses or petticoats are comparatively newer addition. Typically, at the time, only women who worked in white people’s houses or in other official/outdoor spaces, or attended public functions, blouses and petticoats were forgone entirely while wearing the saree.  
> 4\. “Starch” especially rice-starch was used to stiffen up and iron the linen.  
> 5\. “Ayaah”: a cross between a nurse, abigail, companion, or, if employed for children, nanny  
> 6\. “Memsahib”: respectful address to a white woman and superior  
> 7\. “doh-ti” or dhoti refers to a length of broadcloth worn by Indian men—again, across multiple ethnicities. It is the male counterpart to the women’s sarees, and is worn in particular wraps and folds.  
> 8\. “baksheesh”: Reward or tip  
> 9\. Bengal is the province (currently the Indian state of West Bengal and the nation of Bangladesh) which has Calcutta/Kolkata, the trading post-turned city and seat of the British colonial government and trade alliances.  
> 10\. Darjeeling is a mountain town in Bengal. Darjeeling and Shimla, a city in a different state, were used as summer capitals to escape the tropical summer by the British raj. Darjeeling is still known for missionary educational and medical institutions that started during the missionary immigrations and have continued.  
> 11.“Hindoustani”: Hindi and its many dialects used across Eastern and Northern India  
> 12\. “Gora”, “Firang”: White People  
> 13\. “Tonga”: Horse carriage  
> 14\. “Sahib”, sometimes shortened to “sa’ab”: Respectful address to a white man (or woman) by someone not white  
> 15\. “Doktor sa’ab”: Following the above, the white doctor, an address similar to calling a doctor by his title  
> 16\. . “Malik-da pata hai?”: Does your employer know?  
> 17\. "Pishachen": Demoness  
> 18\. Bidi: local rolled leaves and tobacco that can be smoked like cigarettes  
> 19\. “Lascar”: Male non-white servant of white men, usually for outdoor errands  
> 20\. “Khansummah”: Cook  
> 21\. “Jheel” “Dighi”: Bengali words for man-made water bodies. Depending on their size (they are much bigger than the average pond in Bengal, a jheel or dighi could be dug to supply a rich man’s house (plumbing was still not a thing, especially in the rural parts), a neighbourhood, or even an entire village. They rarely dry out given the heavy monsoons and richly river fuelled tracks of Bengal. Sometimes, a village might be abandoned or turn into a ghost town because of epidemics like malaria or small pox, the jheel would remain.  
> 22\. “garwan”: Bengali word for bullock cart drivers. Bullock carts were, and are a popular mode of transport both for people and cargo in the backwaters of Bengal.  
> 23\. “Aleya”: Comparable to the Irish will o’ the wisps, except in Bengali folklore, Aleya can be indifferent to deadly, they are rarely a blessing or a guiding light in a good way

The first time Edith gets prickly heat, she is convinced they are chilblains. Only, only she feels like a dragon, and tells Alan, two nurses and Doctor Hadling, personal physician to the Governor of the Calcutta Presidency, very very resolutely that seasickness or not, she hasn’t ever left England, and what she feels is only explained if she is a dragon. There must be red ghosts here too, to tell her about treasures she can sleep on, undisturbed. The air around her is so hot! Her ears and nose and mouth can all give off steam. So hot and humid and is she in the oven that the witch had meant to roast Gretel in? Why is she also stewing if she is a dragon?! Will the water ever stop smelling of blood? Why are they still pouring that and more down her throat?! She never wants to drink anything ever again.

  
She has later demurred in tea parties and visits about being rather apprehensive about the oriental heat, especially after the matrons’, the officers’, the civilians’, the young wives’ and even the native porters’ warnings, and confesses to being rather surprised afterwards, after the fever had receded, that she did not shrivel into a pine staff. In fact, she has an easier time settling in compared to Miss P from Milton. Till then, she had half-grimaced every time and said she couldn't be warm enough after C--, but, despite the damp underclothes sticking to her back and the chafed crackle of the sun on her skin, it is the mosquitoes that truly perturb her.

  
Now, affixing the sliding wire of her glasses back to the bridge, she glances at Alan while surreptitiously trying to scratch her neck. She won’t allow him to pour that foul cinchona tonic down her throat again. The carriage’s lurching is bad enough. She cannot be held responsible if her lunch refuses to stay in already. Alan can be as fussy and owlish as she can be recalcitrant; they have been testing each other’s endurance in turns for the last six months, ever since she has truly left her sickroom and he has truly forsaken his walking stick in favour of a doctor’s bag again. Only, even a soporific Alan is an Alan bursting with strange reserves of alacrity-- medical training must truly mean one is never entirely burgled-- and so, compelled to waive off his grasping hands towards the crocodile skin bag she had bought rather impulsively, sheepishly, at Picadilly-- the first attempt at shopping barely a sennight after the first earnest attempt at a walk in London’s weak sunlight-- confound it and its current contents, she gasps, “The fabric is rather scratchier than I expected, how are your linens?” She is acutely aware that she’d have scandalised Mrs B, Miss N and Sister Constance had they but heard, but the dastardly bag has been left alone for now, and Alan mumbles something about the small mercies of escaping the punishment that were Jod-purr-ees, and starts snoring softly again.

  
The fabric is scratchy. Of the dozen or so dresses that contrived their way into her trunks the moment they set foot in Calcutta, the weave of most feels familiar despite the difference just enough that she is constantly befuddled by them, halfway into her day. All her erstwhile laments about the itchiness of the English lace so favoured in Buffalo feel like a distant mockery. How Father would laugh, the crows feet around his eyes crinkling deeper.

  
The clothes, Edith narrows her eyes, think about the clothes, wonder at the looms that Nathni has promised to show her some day, concentrate on the dye that escapes the sah-rees whenever Nathni or Tilu work with water, feel the serrated edges of the gown that is so new it smells strange even after two washes. Remember what they said about starch. Remember starch, not...not anything else. There is a lot more travelling to be done. Poor Alan shouldn’t have to look for another stop in the middle of the four hundred mile trudge in this sun-baked road, especially...especially given the stories. Her hands tighten on her scarf. She wonders whether she should fake a fainting spell for just about enough time that they have to set camp Before. But the part of her mind that wants to, despite the cost, the possibility of loss again, that reckless pea-sized part of her brain urges the carters and their driver on, and laments just as hard as O’Flaherty, the orderly and chief of supplies at the St. Marthe Convent and Hospital, Darjeeling, that really, the schedule is all but undone for the first time. Because of her. Her fainting, her attacks of hysteria, her frequent calls for a stop. She apologises till O’Flaherty, purple and sweaty, stammers a hasty,”First time for everything, ma’arm, no trouble!” and hurries over to the caravan of carts on saddleback again.

  
She doesn’t want any more morphia or opium, and she may moult like a snake if anyone tries pouring brandy in her to calm her nerves in this heat. She clutches at her journal and focuses on the eau-de-cologne, mud pitcher and chequered red cloth Nathni keeps at her side, some sort of a towel from the sound of it, and bigger than any handkerchief she may carry to assuage Nathni’s (and Alan’s) derision of them. She hadn’t really minded the textures that much, though she was still beet-red like a schoolboy caught at mischief too easily ever since she had seen for the first time how translucent both the linen and the muslin was, how paltry the number of flounces and petticoats accorded proper. The British women had felt more alien suddenly, a sharp tug at an unknotting of Lucille-- Lucille’s face. Lucille’s face framed by her stiff collars and bonnets, the milky white skin of her shoulders, her hair, then, then the snow with a smear of red.

  
Edith had instinctively clutched at her heavy skirts and tuckers, till her wonderful treasure of an ayaah started lining her chemises with soft, sturdy pieces of broadcloth called doh-ti. They did not cook her like most of the bundles in her trunk, but she could also walk around without worrying about parading about with sweat-drenched flimsy cloth moulded to her legs, and worse, hips. Nathni had refused the baksheesh , to her surprise, and shyly requested “more talking, memsahib? For good English?” A big and daring move for her, poor woman, but Edith had liked her the better for it. She had already tired of the curious, the gossipy and the patronising, and it took a little more resolve every night to tell herself she preferred lonelinss. Nathni had later told her that Americans are crazier than even the English, despite being just as gora, and could be gambled on to indulge better in eccentricities sometimes. Edith was grateful to pay kindness with kindness. That’s how the stories had started.

II

  
The Aleya is a monster. It is the she-ghost of the marshes.  
The Aleya is dancing flames promising people, the comfort of home, the fire of trickle drip civilisation, habitation, hospitality. The only deliverance from the Aleya-witch is a slick drowning in the bogs, in the slimy mud and rotten life-- the promise of betel green water for the wretchedly parched, lost. Once you have bungled your way to her sight, once her voice can touch your mind, you pray for the water soon enough.

But the Aleya herself is never touched by the zits, the marsh, the mud. She floats above the bog, dancing away the night. The lone survivor comes home to the womenfolk who can never step out to see her or anyone else, and talks of a woman with hair as long and dark as the night sky, and eyes as bright as coal. The lamp in her hand flames at her call, windswept and lilting, if light could lilt. Her laughter like shards of glass as she watches travelers, pilgrims, runaways, men who never dance, dance in the bog, vomit out the slush, keep vomiting until their guts are too weighed down with river clay, and their lungs are burst balloons. Even after that, the women who dare to walk or enter a palanquin or tonga and have to then sit and watch in terrified stupor watch the flame, all the colours of the rainbow and a dozen others dance above the sweet smelling moss on the whetted stones.

Her voice holds all the music partnering her dance, the crackling of her lamp’s flame being the only other sound. No one has really seen her mouth (everyone shudders too hard to recall, or imagine, her eyes) but everyone knows she has the tinkling laughter of knives grinding on the bells on infants’ anklets.

If the dance holds any welcome, it is solely in the eyes (and ears) that choose to read so. The Aleya could just like dancing. Bogs aren’t nice places for most things, but foreigners and Un-gods are strange folk. It is a good thing. It would be awkward to have one sing and dance in the village courtyard. (Young boys are always hot-blooded oafs. And pray, what will the young girls learn?!) Besides, even the Gods can’t resist the Un-gods, they say, and wars in paradise are bloody affairs. What if the dance is too strange, or worse, too familiar? Besides, a village won’t survive the quaking earth and the pull of the water in its wake.

The singing-and-dancing, as far as the Aleya is concerned, has never promised refuge, or so the story goes, or so it probably should.

III

  
The first day is all about poppies. The second, mustard.  
Edith remembers the crunch of the gravel in Esplanade and contrasts it with the grating of wheels on mud and dry stalk, grass, poppy flowers, flea carcasses, down the waves and waves of blue gray flowers with purple veins webbed over their faces and unearthly green bodies. She can’t tell the direction they are heading to after some time (she doesn’t bother finding the way to the sun). How strange to not know, Stranger though, is the instinctive exhilaration of lurching with the twists and turns the carriage takes with recklessness despite the migraine, the aches, the weakness of her stomach. She placates the ignorance with a self-conscious false bravado, a rash courage that had begun looking fake within the first quarter of the first mile. She had slept surreptitiously in the afternoon, worrying about the way onward from the Darjeeling Mail. How remote could the hospital be? Alan’s appointment looked very good on paper, and it sounded like a hamlet, in the least. But now her head is full of worries about night chowkis and poppy fumes, and confess! Indian will’o the wisps. The ground beneath had been softer than she had anticipated, more uneven than her apprehensions would credit to acknowledge. In between, once she had sat up bolt upright with the half memory of the cool graze of the helm of one of the bullock carts heaving behind their two-horse tonga. She had laid back with a heart hammering badly enough that it had cost two three quarterly doses of aconite to truly subside.

  
It was a blessing, at any rate. By the time Edith had felt well enough to emerge out of the hotel into the swarming tropical heat of the bazaars, Alan had found her a veritable army of lascars, khansummahs, and ayaahs. But Nathni and Tilu had lingered with an honesty that was deeply likable. And now, with a life waiting to be built in Darjeeling, and if it is still too warm for her health, in Shimla, there was company she could bear, a retinue small enough to not sour Alan’s face about the disparities in their income, and a life that had the tentative hopes of finding the key pieces of furniture to furnish it again.

She is still slightly overwhelmed by the flies and the glare of the sun, certainly. But the natives aren't half bad. And all the English officers of this presidency, and their lady wives seem to talk and smell too much of the factory towns and farms of the southern coasts of the isle to have heard of C--. They appear a bit too coarse after Lucille's cold civilities and Thomas' gentle charms. Or perchance this is the true blue English society really, despite all the nose scrunching derision of her French co-passengers about how India is almost entirely run down by the bourgeoisie. And even if it is, Edith doesn't know, can barely gauge.  
They don't look and feel much different from the Mrs. Hardings and Ms. Jeffersons to her. And the men have a strange likeness to the kind of company her father kept. All of them treat her kindly enough, the speculative glances are things she is finally unoffended by. Heavens knew, she’d be inordinately, indecently curious about herself. They were much better at restraining themselves. And they are shrewd. Shrewd and coarse and genteel and brusque. As one of them says, her majesty's services don't really allow for namby-pamby eccentricities, and the poets and lovers drop like fruit flies in this scorching country's taverns. Calcutta, with its Strand and Esplanade and grisly little bazaars (Alan wouldn’t let her breathe the air around the Black Town despite her initial attempts to venture in it) is a surprise and a shock.  
She had been afraid to leave her suite the first few days, but then plump Mrs Mason blocked her way in a deliberate amble the first time she tried the balcony in the growing dusk. And in between the introductions and pleasantries, it stuck her so very very odd and welcomed to be sympathised with for her very short lived marriage (it is obvious, apparently) and congratulated in the same tone on her upcoming nuptials. ("In separate suites too! So very proper! But will you find any Methodist Parsons in Calcutta, dear? Darjeeling might have one or two. And what is the missionary hospital Dr. Mcmichael intends to join?") Alan, thankfully, never speaks of impending nuptials, only spills his tea a little and loosens his collar. The voyage has been long enough for her to ponder her options and take refuge in what little ambivalences she can. It's an unerring bliss to leave the regiment behind, with their good wishes and assumptions of an extremely short engagement. Once they reach Darjeeling, Edith will puzzle out which new lie to tell till she is ready to accept a new truth.

  
Alan is no good, because he will accept and agree to play along with whatever she decides, and once upon a time it would have given her a headache and her blood would have heated at tandem with the volume of her loud homilies. Nowadays she likes the quiet and the quiet company of her journal, and likes the fact of being able to lean on Alan and letting him lean on her on the bad days.  
Alan isn't well versed in Hindoustani or Bengali yet, so they will not consider a private practice or buying a house. It ought to be fun in a few months, exploring India. India! With its silks and muslins and intricate toys and strange food, even, even the flies are welcome to the cold sterile festering of her last home. And she ‘really’ likes the people, as she declares to Alan over supper within the first fortnight. Sure, Mrs Peterson can keep warning her about how sly and lazy the servants can be, but she is so glad she has a native companion and not one of the social secretaries she and Alan were briefly considering. Edith's sentences run away from each other in her journal, and her nightshirts are drenched in sweat. Nathni introduces her to the ice water that is a staple here, and concoctions of rock salt, jaggery and lemons. She lives on those for a month, till Alan asks her whether he should start making enquiries about the full gamut of the local vegetables in case she is off meat entirely. She starts on eggs and poultry, but won't go near red meat. Alan says something about tropical heat and buys her an even more unwieldy palm-frond umbrella. The troubles keep persisting. They think she is done with it once the worse of her sea legs are over, but they had thought that in that little inn in South Pekington, in the hotel closest to the police station at C--, once she stopped vomiting her bowels out for the first time at the Inquest, then after dinner every following night, then at sea. Thank God for Mrs. Porter, who was joining her eldest here finally after her husband's passing, and who was delighted by the propriety these young people were trying to maintain. Edith hadn’t been ashamed of stripping down to her shifts and needing three changes every night, sometimes with an entire new set of bed linens, and darling Mrs. Porter didn’t just agree to share her cabin, but perfectly, high-handedly handed over the soiled linens and chamber pots to the attendants. Edith would have died of mortification, but she was too exhausted to do nothing but breathe. It helped that Mrs Porter had just buried a husband who had suffered from battle fatigue for twenty-two years. May she find joy in Punjab.

  
Here, Nathni strips her of shame even quicker, sharing tales of childhood scars and intimate knowledge of nursing women old, young, expecting, child brides after the first nights: housecalls where she has been told to go dress a wound and on arriving assisted abortions and hysterical fits. They were so relieved when Alan could confirm that she wasn't expecting.  
The troubles don’t go away though. She is told the words “female hysteria” so often that she starts preferring doctors who discuss the long term effects of prolonged slow poisoning. Alan now has a special pouch he carries her morphia, chamomile and aconite in, along with his belladonna, arnica and epsom. She hopes she will be better in the cooler, bracing mountain air of Darjeeling. But she can no longer be sure of it. Two years begin to make everything-- including her vaguely broken body-- a habit.

  
She hadn't complained initially. Initially, she only retched, coughed, watched her skin burn and apologised. And thanked. And apologised. The English magistrate had pitied her American nineteen-year-old self. The papers had mostly been kept out of it, but had lamented her losses like she was an Ariadne adrift. Alan had been convalescing just as much, and still tried being a best friend and father rolled in one till she had to give him a talk. The waters of Bath hadn't done her much good. The specialists in London agreed with Alan a bit too much for her to seek comfort in. Eventually, after six months, after a vague sense of warmth started creeping back to her skin, after her fever and cough started truly receding, and her lawyers from Buffalo started sounding more and more resigned about her decisive and perpetual lack of desire to return to it, she and Alan had spoken.

  
She had understood how hard a hit to his budding practice the vaguely leaked news back home was. She understood how much older a person Alan had truly become in the way he was resigned and quiet about it. She had wept in solitude and joked with him at supper, and then sputtered garbled apologies intertwined with gratitude when he came to her bed, still bandaged, to hold her thrashing body right alongside her nurse through her spasms and nightmares. She had offered a retirement, her inheritance, in the hopes of a resolution, and had no wish to revisit that fight. At the one year mark, they had reached the consensus of not lingering in England. And finally, Alan had sat her down and explained that she needed a companion or different lodgings for him to appear respectable enough for his new appointment. They later found out that they needn't have worried. That few doctors were rejected. Fewer still didn’t have at least one mistress. But Alan had always wanted to serve a proper hospital-- St. Marthe’s was one of the renowned ones-- and they were afraid that the nuns would feel strongly about it.

  
They announced a quiet engagement once they reached Calcutta, and sent the appropriate telegrams. It had been a neat two years by then, respectable enough after a first marriage of three months. It was strange to see the word Sharpe trailing her so, especially after the engagement.  
Alan had gruffly tried assuring her of not having any expectations. And she had looked up from the apron she was trying to put on while still sitting and asked, "Why?"  
Alan had turned beet red. She had always known England was a bad influence.  
She continued setting up her writing board, her journal, her inkpot and pen (she needed an apron to write nowadays, she blotted too much, her hands shook enough to smudge and spill aplenty).  
"Edith, we are not discussing a sandwich." Alan had said, quietly.  
"Sandwiches are complicated, " she had rejoined, "This appears simple enough."  
Alan had sat down with a pucker in his eyebrows.

But you see, she had seen him watch, not only out of worry, when she swam in the dighi next to the wing that housed the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. She remembers being reminded of making short work of her bath, quietly, strictly, in ways that put her teeth on edge.  
She remembers the wet slap of her chemise, the dank, sweat and water smelling weight of her hair, tangled ropes of it under the sun, the runnels of shivery wet along her limbs. She remembers breathing in the pungent, mixed smell of the water when the strange oils Nathni rubbed on her hair, her back, her limbs were licked away in greasy droplets, the soft nudging of wet mud, shapla and small fish.  
Dust cakes her skin now. In the past day, water has touched her only when she drank a mouthful every few hours. Distilled water and pitchers filled from Calcutta have to last, she understands. She feels the unfamiliarly familiar parched roasting in her throat like she has swallowed sand rubbed with salt. Alan sleeps, confident in his new appointment, of her companionship.

IV

  
Two months ago, Nathni had fingered her cuffs for dirt until she was satisfied. They think only the men crowding the docks work as guides. But they also think all firangs come here for one good high and some good long fucks, the kind only brown dicks or cunts can deliver. And Nathni pisses on the first thought, spits on the second, and continues doing what she does: she turns up in the part-hospital part white-people’s-home scrubs of her own invention, stands quietly till the first rush of tongawallahs and guides subsides around the newest bunch of harrowed tourists emerging from the belly of the white sea monster, sizes up the trickling line of faces, makes her pick and gets to work. Firangs, like desis, she has come to realise, find a woman immediately safer, more honest, more dependable, less swindling. The scrubs make it look legitimate, even. She has checklists of how firangs hate touching. Most touching. At least in the beginning. Mind you, by the end of the day they can be sprawled all across you, with their strange skirts half hitched up, making the skin on your elbows prick with their hair and scabs, but on first sight, god help your business if you try breathing down their neck. And that is of course what the men do. Fuckers. If they still haven’t keyed on to the fact that she is an unregistered ayaah stealing their moolah-puking birds, more fools, them. Today, she has a bit of a bidi action going when one of the two-by-twos decides to sneer at her through a moustache.  
“ _Malik-da_ pata _hai?_ ”  
Sikh. South Beniatola slums, but she could be mistaken. Two-horse tonga. The horses don’t look like they’d drop dead.  
She has a fake paper (cost her ten rupees, honest, make no mistake) but she doesn’t bother. This is good. All is good if she can make ’em all work for her.  
She scrunches her face in a pathetic you-caught-me vulnerability and starts the softly pitched groan about the long working hours and how an anglo-friend back at work told her to try, no Sardarji, really she gets so fed up with the weird pink old hags she has to collect and slave-boot herself to, and on such bad pay, she knows she will not do the ganja route ever, she doesn’t come from that sort of a home, only the last three days have been so long and her last collect so freaky she honestly thought they were zombie pishachen, and thank god Ma doesn’t know what all she has to bear to stay employed in an honest way, and by the end of it Sardarji’s moustache itself is gleaming with patronising sympathy and avuncular chiding, and there, another older, well-known, well-respected man to vouch for her job-pretensions if she ever gets in trouble, with the kind of credibility she will never get. It could be longer (she has polished herself up to the perfect fifteen minute recital, dropping cues, taking them) but the last gate is finally full on earnestly throwing up people and the ant crawl towards the exit has just started, so Sardarji’s sermon has to wait, and in a moment she has been deserted in favour of a wrestle with a Jat from a rival gang.  
And her face, slightly tired, slightly twitchy, had shut like a trap when she noticed being watched. But maybe this one wasn’t that respectable herself and spoke funnier than the rest of the goras, and two months later, Nathni is here as much for the job as for her. Edith memsa’ab is too much a handful for even the two of them-- the doktor sahib and her-- together. She reminds her of a friend who spouted as many strange questions and odd requests and horrible stories till she had died of black fever at fifteen.

Only now, on the road, two hundred miles away from the cluttered safety of Calcutta, the stories don’t feel scary enough for the reality of the jheel they will reach in minutes if they don’t trace their steps back already. The jheel. She starts pulling out hurricane lanterns, watches Edith prepare the wick of one in triumphant glee before handing it to her, and then frowning, and nodding to her growing unease. The sun begins to dip, the air begins to cool, and Nathni can see the edges of the greens that crowd the waters. She had forgotten to warn them the last time Edith needed to stop and the garwans had groaned, loudly. The Circuit House was still a good fifteen miles off, Edith sahib had already had a very hard day. Nathni had been on tenterhooks since the afternoon, ever since they had to stop one time too many to time it right, and now she considers asking the Doktor sa’ab to settle for the closest copse. The garwans are already making noises about pitching camp. Even if the other gora convinces Doktor sa’ab to keep going, she can stone the hooves of the bullocks, grease the shins of the horses, mix enough starch in their fodder that they droop with sleep, hide all the rum if the garwans are asked to give some to the animals to keep them going, she thinks, her desperation numbing her by the minute. She sits quietly, figuring the size of the stone needed to drive a horse mad enough but not so injured that its lasting. Edith beckons her, bright-eyed, and watches as she slides off the back of the cart and huffs her way up the tonga, Edith, her eyes too bright, says, “Why aren’t the men scared? Doesn’t she call out to them?”  
“These are Bhutias from the hills. Tribes people. They generally don’t come this far down. They don’t know, the idiots. All their ghosts are stone-like mountain ones. She is Bengali. She keens in Bangla.”  
Edith nods, “If she calls out in Bangla, they won’t be able to follow, surely?”  
“They are still men. She may like the variety. What if she can sing in Bhutani?!” Nathni pauses, “She may like you. She may not have seen a firang before. Also. Only the men are driving,” Nathni makes a face, “What if the fools drive us straight into the bogs? Fat lot of good being a garden variety Bengali woman would be then. And I can’t manage horses otherwise I would’ve driven your tonga and that would be that.”  
“You wouldn’t care about the others?” Edith’s question is no different in tone than when she asks why must one offer milk to snakes, and Nathni has a blessedly grateful moment for that.  
“I would use the cattle rope to tie all of them to each other, and lead with the tonga, like a ...like a train. And I would tie all the men up.” Nathni said solemnly.  
Edith had seen those ropes, they were as thick as her neck. She could.  
“But will tying them up stop it?”  
“It won’t be easy,” Nathni admits, “But it beats watching them go like wee babies.”  
“Good. Alan had the morphia an hour back. I have, er, affixed him to the seat with my scarves. And plugged his ears.”  
Nathni stares at her.  
“He took it himself!,” Edith protests, “He said he had a headache from all the jerking. I wouldn’t--!” Nathni’s silence feels less recriminatory, but then she blanches like Edith has never seen her blanch.  
“Oh god! We are done. She is here. Look! Sahib! She has started.”  
Edith’s hands on her journal tighten, ”Now. I hope she knows English.”


End file.
